What Is a Snack Stadium, or Snackadium?

Football season is finally, officially underway, and that means but one thing: We must all begin planning the awesome and dangerous food-based architecture that is the Snack Stadium. What? You've never heard of a Snack Stadium? Dear reader, let us take a walk through recent history:

Snack Stadiums, or "snackadiums" for the portmanteau-minded, are today's savory, sports-themed answer to German gingerbread houses of yore. But this is America, and here we make everything bigger, more structurally sound, and with many, many more calories. According to Google, the first stadium of snacks was probably built in late 2008. Some unknown, brave young American threw her or himself an enormous Super Bowl party, and decided in a moment of pure genius to take the great pile of potato chips, dips, sausages, hot dogs, cheese cubes, salsa, guacamole, nachos, and other munchables, and—instead of heaping them in a pile on the table like usual—chose to design and build an homage to the very game that everyone was gathering to watch. A photograph was taken and an <del>abomination</del> intriguing phenomenon was born.

In 2010, the Los Angeles Times profiled Break.com as they built a three-story, 110,428 calorie behemoth replete with a chocolate-bar scoreboard, thus setting the standard for snackadium excellence. As the Times wrote of the event: "Deftly wielding frosting, Cracker Jacks, doughnuts (and holes), deli meat, sweaty cheese, and some broccoli—to make mom happy—the stadium was an ode to beer bellies and lap bands across America." Who could resist that kind of clarion call? The movement took off, and households across America began building their own edible shrines to our national sport. The craft, if you will, of snackadium-building has gotten so popular there are even how-to videos for novices:

Yes, across America, hearty souls borne by the opposing pillars of athletic prowess and high-calorie intake have celebrated the culmination of the football season by erecting enormous, table-sized stadia (often replicas of the exact ones the game is being played in), replete with fans, players, goal-posts, and generally some kind of guacamole field. All out of food. Sometimes there's even a little iPhone Jumbotron. You may think, Now that's taking Instagram one step too far. But we think: Because of course there is.

Alas, there is but one drawback to these amazing objects of art: They rarely photograph well. Think of them as the Sasquatch of exorbitant food architecture. Photos exist (oh, do they exist!), but they are almost uniformly bad: oddly cropped, poorly colored, filled with background clutter, or all of the above. Partly this is because, once built, they cannot be moved. And most people are building them in their dining rooms or near the television, and not in professional photography studios or anywhere near a source of natural light. Partly this is because, if it's not already clear, they are enormous and often frighteningly detailed, making it difficult to get everything into the frame. Mostly, though, it's because they take so long to build that once they're completed, everyone's pretty hungry and doesn't want to stand around while the host takes photos for half an hour and the game is starting pretty soon anyway, and seriously you used all the chips in the house, can I just have like a small handful at least?

Which is why we're asking you, our readers, to build and photograph the best of your own 2013–2014 season Snack Stadiums, as lovingly lit, as temptingly produced, as fantastically overbuilt as possible. Use some of our homemade guacamole. Use our hand-fried potato chips. Try one of our cheese dips. Stack as many of our sandwiches as you can around the sides. Tweet the results at us @bonappetit, and we'll feature our favorites here on BonAppetit.com, immortalizing your contribution to what we can all agree is the 21st-century equivalent of Bauhaus.